Mainstream media coverage has focused on the issue of monopolies in the technology sector ever since there was the talk of splitting up Microsoft into more than one company. Few organizations, however, have ever actually pressed for any real action that would solve the problem.
One of the biggest reasons for this is the fact that when tech companies make outlandish statements, few people believe them. Back in the 1970s, people like Steve Wozniak and Paul Allen were predicting a future where everyone had personal computers on their desks. Very few financial analysts believed that this was actually possible.
The digital revolution happened, and those who foresaw it ended up in almost total control of it. Today, the same thing is going once again and many in the media aren't fully aware of what's at stake as a result.
Consider the example of software monocultures that are plaguing almost every industry.
Software Monocultures & the Lack of Alternatives
In some markets, a single firm controls every option that users have available to them. Desktop and laptop computers have long been dominated solely by the Windows platform, which has allowed certain cyberattacks to take down huge subsections of the general population.
The same problem is now affecting web hosting control panels. Plesk and cPanel are the two dominant names in the industry, and they control a massive 98.4 percent market share between the two of them. To make matters worse, they're now both controlled by a single company.
While some webmasters have started to look for free and open-source alternatives, it seems like a majority are happy to continue to use the big players in spite of what they could be sacrificing in terms of privacy and security.
Even in use cases that don't involve major privacy impacts, monopolies have caused serious problems that are sometimes flat out silly. In some cases, companies are out for money and don't want anyone to know about it.
License Griefers & Patent Trolls
While the exFAT file system originally came out in 2006, it wasn't until 2019 that a free kernel module was available for developers. This is in spite of the fact that the system is a standard used by the SD Card Association for all memory devices bigger than 64 GB.
Companies that wanted to provide native support either had to reverse engineer the standard or pay a license fee. Samsung tried the first method, which doesn't always work. Large firms like Apple, however, paid a fee and kept the cycle spinning around.
There's currently no single file system that supports the Windows, Macintosh, GNU/Linux, iOS and Android platforms equally that allows free transfer of files in excess of 4GB. It's shocking to think that as we approach 2020 it's still hard to share data between devices.
This isn't a technology issue, however. It's due to the fact that major tech monopolies don't want to allow users access to precious patents.
Some politicians have demanded the breakup of larger tech firms, but that hasn't stopped Amazon from promoting private label brands in a way that hurts small businesses.
In fact, it looks like these firms will continue engaging in non-competitive business practices for the foreseeable future.
Stifling Competition in a Virtual World
Pundits have called for Washington insiders to impose existing antitrust laws on companies that continue to behave in this way. While people from all sides of the political spectrum have commented on potential action, it's unlikely anything will get done.
After all, many of these politicians rely on contributions from large companies that profit by unfairly manipulating online resources. Since they have such massive financial backing, many companies can simply flat out buy any new competitors before they get any chance of really having an impact on the industry.
Fortunately, some people have taken the issue into their own hands. Blockchain technology, for instance, has encouraged the decentralization of certain online business processes.
Many people have also installed open-source operating systems that compete with those sold by the largest vendors. Still, this has little impact on the way that eCommerce giants like Amazon can push smaller firms out of business until only they remain.
Additional regulation is also a potentially frightening idea. Governmental authorities could just as easily act the same way as larger technology firms, but they'd have even less oversight since they're technically the organizations blessed with the job of policing other groups.
In the meantime, it might be best for users to force change on their own by using alternative solutions.
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